Elevated Mole and Mezcal at Claro

T. J. Steele, who splits his time between New York and Oaxaca, is challenging the idea that Mexican food should be inexpensive and informal.

The food at Claro, in Gowanus, is Mexican with a focus on the specialties of Oaxaca, where the chef, T. J. Steele, spends half his time.

Photograph by Cole Wilson for The New Yorker

In English, the Spanish word claro translates literally to “clear,” but, as the owners of Claro, a new Mexican restaurant in Gowanus, explain on their Web site, it’s also used to mean “of course.” It’s what I would say if someone asked me if, when I went to Mexico City, I ate at the oft-Instagrammed seafood restaurant Contramar, and if I tried the famous tuna tostada: ¡Claro que sí! Of course I did. And so I was delighted to find a similar dish at Claro: a tortilla toasted until golden and crunchy, adorned with gently mashed avocado, luscious pink cubes of raw yellowfin, juicy wedges of winter’s last Cara Cara oranges, and shards of bubbly chicharrón.

Steele is one of a host of American and Mexican chefs who are challenging the idea that Mexican food should be informal and inexpensive.

Photograph by Cole Wilson for The New Yorker

One of these costs twenty-four dollars at Claro. It’s not that the chef, T. J. Steele, a white American who splits his time between New York and Oaxaca, is gussying up traditional Mexican food with luxury touchstones. He, along with a host of other chefs in both the U.S. and Mexico, is simply challenging the idea that Mexican food should be inexpensive and informal, using high-quality ingredients to make everything from scratch, and paying rent in a recently gentrified neighborhood. And so heirloom corn is nixtamalized in-house daily, for tortilla-like Oaxacan memelas, which are slightly fatter and come loaded with wild mushrooms and epazote or chorizo and potatoes. Shreds of Steele’s own quesillo, a Oaxacan string cheese, might top shrimp tacos or a salad of tender leek tops, red cabbage, carrot fronds, and pea shoots, tossed in an herby dressing made with ground chapulines (grasshoppers).

Heirloom corn is nixtamalized in-house daily, for fresh tortillas (left) and tortilla-like Oaxacan memelas (right), which are slightly fatter and come loaded with chorizo and potato or wild mushrooms and epazote.

Photograph by Cole Wilson for The New Yorker

Oaxaca is known for its mole, an expansive category of incredibly complex chili-based sauces that often get reduced to “bitter chocolate” in the States, even though they don’t necessarily contain cacao. Steele usually offers a few kinds: a sweet but balanced rust-colored rojo, blanketing pork cheek; a negro that cooks twice as long, served over grass-fed short rib; a smoky mole chocolate cake. But if there’s one Oaxacan export he’ll truly expand your understanding of, it’s mezcal. At Claro, it’s treated like wine—a knowledgeable bartender will walk you through tasting notes for the fifty or so varieties—and like whiskey, offered with a beer as a boilermaker and in cocktails. The leche totochtin, a savory milk punch for which the spirit is washed in duck fat, might sound exceedingly strange, but did you know that some mezcal is distilled with a raw chicken or turkey breast hanging over it? Now you do. And the next time someone tries to impress you with that fact, there will be only one response: Claro. (Dishes $13-$32.) ♦

At Claro, mezcal, Oaxaca’s most famous export, is treated both like wine—there are more than fifty varieties on the menu—and like whiskey, offered with a beer as a boilermaker and in cocktails.

Photograph by Cole Wilson for The New Yorker

This article appears in the print edition of the May 14, 2018, issue, with the headline “Claro.”

Hannah Goldfield is the food critic for The New Yorker and newyorker.com.